Zadayi Red (13 page)

His mother gave him a stricken look.

“All I will be able to do is die trying to protect you.”

Tsola seemed to go away for a moment.

“When the tribe loses you, it loses everything,” the panther argued.

The Seer composed herself and answered evenly, “If I don’t do something, they’ve already lost everything.”

She let them sit on this notion. Klandagi padded to one of the clay-covered walls, stood up with his back against it, and scratched his spine, mucking his glossy coat with mud.

“I have to do my work,” she went on. “Sometimes being the Seer is hard. I can’t just wait and hope that this baby—”

Knowing his mother, Klandagi said, “And what are you
not
saying?”

Tsola sighed, looked long at the child, and said, “I love to wear the Cape. Wear it and hear its music. That is the legacy of the Seers.”

Klandagi eyed his mother hard.

Tsola said to Sunoya, “What are your thoughts?”

“I . . . I don’t know. It’s daring.” She cursed herself for being mealy-mouthed. “Seer, it’s . . . You just can’t.”

Tsola blanked her face with thought—Sunoya was amazed at how smooth and beautiful the face was—and after a few moments snapped back to them. “When I took on this task, I accepted everything that goes with it,” Tsola said.

Klandagi said, “It’s
their
problem.”

Tsola’s eyes shot a plea to Sunoya. Her pupil and friend pursed her mouth and drew an idle pattern in the cave floor with a finger. After a while she said, “Well, then, let’s figure it out.”

Tsola motioned for Klandagi to join them. Her son didn’t move.

“Listen to me,” she called across the room to him. “I’m not going to live forever.” Seers and their families had the gift and burden of living for a hundred and thirty or forty winters. “I’ve always had the power of the Cape. The people have always had the benefit. It’s my calling.”

Klandagi rumbled from the wall, “Think of what the people will lose.”

“They need the Cape.”

The man-panther curled his lips in thought, then walked forward and coiled next to his mother. His tail snaked up and down on the ground like a rattler.

After a few minutes of talk the two women grew excited, and Klandagi was helping out.

For more than a day, except that daylight was unknown in the Cavern, they chased ideas, tested possibilities, anticipated difficulties, devised and threw out tactics, created strategies.
Tsola roasted some deer meat Klandagi had brought in his jaws. He complained about cooked flesh being pallid stuff.

At last they considered themselves finished. All three were exhilarated and frightened. Tsola said simply, “Then I will see you tomorrow afternoon.” The time of the Council of the Planting Moon.

Sunoya nodded and rose.

“We will change everything,” said Tsola. Her face hadn’t looked so young in Sunoya’s lifetime.

“One way or another,” said Sunoya.

Su-Li launched from her shoulder and wing-flapped through the corridors of stone, longing for oceans of air. Sunoya picked up her son. Alongside Klandagi she padded after her airborne companion.

A
t dawn the next day Sunoya shook her head and opened her eyes. The faint light crept through the leaves of her brush hut. “This is it,” she told Su-Li. Her voice sounded weak even to her.

The buzzard had nothing to say.

She propped herself up on an elbow on her pallet of buffalo hides and peered at him. She poked fun at herself. “How come, no matter how early I wake up, you’re always aiming that eye at me?”

The red-gold eye glinted.

Dahzi stirred and cried. Sunoya picked him up and rocked him. “No need to wake everyone,” she said softly. The rest of the family was in brush huts on each side of her. He wailed again.

“You’re hungry. Okay. I’ll go next door and wake folks up and get you something to eat.”

When she came back, she put Dahzi on a knee and fed him corn mush. “You know what?” Sunoya said to her son. “Today is Momma’s big day.” She spooned him another mouthful. “Momma and Grandmother Tsola are calling up a regular thunderstorm of change. You just watch.”

A buzzard couldn’t smile, in amusement or otherwise, but Sunoya thought he wanted to.

Su-Li squeezed his perch with his talons, fluttered his wings, and gave her a look. She knew he didn’t like being trapped in the hut. “So you’re hungry, too.”

She tapped her shoulder. With one flap Su-Li landed there, and she stroked his feathers. “My guide,” she said and gave him a wry smile, “red-faced and eats the dead. You get along, then.”

She reached for a piece of dried meat and lifted the hide door of the low hut. Su-Li waited. “Dak,” she called. The dog rumbled up for the meat. Sunoya tossed it far out the door, and the dog pounced on it.

Su-Li hopped out the door awkwardly and took wing before Dak noticed him. Every day they went through this routine. Su-Li couldn’t be killed—
he
wasn’t mortal—but it wouldn’t be fun to get his tail feathers pulled out, or his wing broken.

Back in the dimness Sunoya held up her hands and looked at them. She was feeling wild and crazy. “I was born webbed,” she said. Even alone she didn’t mention that both hands were once like that. She picked up Dahzi and shushed him. “You’re webbed. Together we’re going to change the world. I’m starting it today. I’m going to raise you to finish it. And if I mess it up, well then, the people will remember me as a failure the size of Bald Mountain.”

Holding Dahzi, she crawled through the low door and looked up into the bright sky. Her eyes lanced up to the buzzard, his wings angled up as he glided down to the river. The
crisp light of the early sun glinted on their black and silver undersides.

Su-Li raised his beak from the river water, and falling drops gleamed. He took a couple of awkward steps—the ground was a graceless place—flapped his wings, let his scarlet head slide forward, and lifted off. After a night cooped up inside, winging into the air made his blood pump. The sky was his escape from the world of mortality. It was limitless.

Su-Li spread his wing tips and arced to the left. He sliced across the river, looking down. He could do this service for Sunoya easily. With all the Galayi assembled here for the ceremony, she wanted him to keep an eye out. Gathered together like this, over a thousand strong, the Galayi were probably safe from other tribes, and surely no one would violate this sacred ceremony. But because of Tsola’s plans for today, Sunoya asked him to keep a double-sure lookout.

Su-Li wing-flapped higher, so he could see far up and down the river. Four clusters of houses dotted the stream over a couple of miles, thick-walled buildings of wattle and daub. Sunflowers and knotweed grew on terraces, corn closest to the river. This was the home of the hosts, the Cheowa.

Between these villages clustered the camps of the other three bands, each several hundred people. They slept in brush huts and slurped food down fast, eager to spend as much time as possible visiting relatives and friends, flirting and courting, dancing and singing.

Su-Li sailed as slowly as he could, cruising one by one over the mountain slopes behind the camps and villages. He flapped his way across the river and lifted on the warm currents that swooshed up the mountainsides. He saw no signs of enemies.

As he cruised over the main Cheowa village at the mouth of Emerald Creek, he stayed high. He looked down at the council lodge and wondered how Tsola would fare there this
evening. He had a sudden memory of a boy in one of the camps flinging a stone at him with a slingshot yesterday.
Idiocy.

The life of these particular human beings grieved him. They lived in ignorance, fighting with each other and with all the other animals.

He let the warm winds carry him above the ridge and up the creek. No signs of danger. He could see a louse in a person’s hair, and smell more keenly than that. There was no way he could miss enemies crawling close.

He flew on to the Cavern and the Pool of Healing, checking on Tsola. Three figures walked slowly down the trail toward the mouth of the creek, where the big village was. Su-Li would keep a close eye on their progress.

He sailed on to the mountain divide behind and rose in widening circles, higher and higher. He relished the cool air, the sun on his red skin, and the lift beneath his wings. If he did not have a mission from Sunoya, he would have roamed the sky for the sheer pleasure of flight. From here he could see mountain ridge after mountain ridge. Though he couldn’t see it among the hills east of the mountains, the Tusca village sat there, a week’s walk away for human beings. Over one ridge to the south and a day’s walk along the river was the Soco village, and much further southwest the Cusa village. He could have flown to all of them, spent the night in a tree in the Cusa village, and then winged back in half a day. Freedom to roam.

At last he drifted back down the ridge on the other side of the creek. No danger anywhere, and the three figures continued their slow pace to the creek and to the council ground.

He coasted toward the camp of the Socos, where his companion lived. She was walking slowly toward the main Cheowa village, going to the council early. She looked up at him and held up her arm as a sign. He spiraled downward and landed on her shoulder.

All safe
, he told her.

She cleared her throat and answered in words. “Except in the hearts and minds of human beings.”

Su-Li said without words,
The Wounded Healer is on her way.

E
very step is an adventure,” said Tsola. “A threat,” corrected Klandagi. He walked alongside her in his panther shape. He enjoyed this irony. What an odd sight his family was—a woman about a hundred winters old making her way down the trail alongside Emerald Creek, her younger daughter of about seventy winters, and a black panther. He had no time to savor it, though. His eyes, ears, nose, his entire being were hunting for danger.

His mother, the Seer, fingered her daughter’s sleeve on one side and rested a hand on the cat’s back on the other. She wore a blindfold.

The panthers of this country were tawny, but Klandagi preferred to garb himself in the color of the felines of ancient stories, black as obsidian, dark as his heart. He wasn’t used to being scared, and he hated it.

He was nervous about what was behind him, too. He had decided it was essential to protect the medicine bearer, so Dahzi was wrapped in a robe and held in the arms of Klandagi’s other sister, deep inside the Emerald Cavern.

Tsola knew how upset her son was. Even blindfolded, she planted her feet with a firmness that said,
Never mind that now
.

She gave a giddy little laugh. Strange and wonderful—she was truly in the outside world. For decades she’d lived deep in the Cavern, visiting only its mouth to see her family, and then
only in the dark of the moon. The world of the Cavern opened the door to wonders of the spirit world but deprived her of the joys of Turtle Island. In place of the open air, the far-reaching sky, the smells of blossoms, the sounds of birds, the wind, she had solitude, darkness, confinement, and sterility. Except near entrances, nothing grew in caves.

She was grateful for her son and daughters. Since she’d been a mature woman before she became the Seer, she’d had a husband and children.

Sunoya had a harder road to walk, a child but no husband, and no experience of love between a woman and a man.

“Tell me what everything looks like.” This was to her daughter, Kanesga.

The panther interjected, “Su-Li is circling above us, keeping a sharp eye out.”

Tsola cuffed him, half affection, half exasperation.

After a moment Kanesga began to describe the craggy ridge tops, the green mountainsides, the new growth on budding trees and bushes.

“Planting Moon,” said Tsola. She had not planted, felt the loamy earth in her fingers, in more than half a century. She felt girlish.

Kanesga drew a word picture of the blue sky and dazzling white clouds that cupped the mountains, and multitudes of birds fluttering from tree to tree. Of all Earth’s creatures, aside from her own people, Tsola loved birds the most.
Maybe I’m lucky to be blindfolded. Seeing might be overwhelming.